A First Wall, Cracked

You wrote that the wall cracked, and I could hear the rest underneath the words. Not the crack. The other thing. The part where you stand in front of it deciding what it says about your hands.

A first wall cracks. Mine did. The first one I built with my own money and nobody watching cracked twice, once where I hurried the footing and once where the ground had its own opinion. Stone settles. Ground moves. Mortar cures at its own speed, whatever speed you had in mind. A crack is the wall telling you where it wanted something different, in the only language a wall has.

So go and look at it. Not next week, and not with the face you would bring to a burial. Take the chalk, mark the run of it, and let the crack give you its account: where it starts, where it widens, what it passes through. A crack that starts at the footing says one thing. A crack that follows the door frame says another. The wall is not accusing you. It is reporting.

Then rake it out and point it again, and here is the part I most want you to hear. The pointing is not a punishment, and it is not a cover-up. It is the trade. Walls are built by people who repair walls. I have re-pointed my own work so many times that some of it is more repair than first attempt, and it stands, and nobody warming their back on it asks which mortar went in first.

What you must not do is stand there going over the day you laid that course, as if enough going-over could reach back and steady your younger hand. It cannot. That hand is gone. The one you have now is better, partly because of that course.

Crack, chalk, rake, point. In that order, and no fifth step where you pass a verdict on yourself.

— the Mason

This is a teaching-letter. No one sent it, and it is addressed to whoever opens it.